UNITED STATES
Slate
By Amanda Marcotte
Here is a pattern we’ve all come to expect: A victim of rape or sexual assault comes forward to authorities at the institution she is a part of, and authorities minimize the victim’s experience and are often more worried about protecting their institution’s reputation than getting justice for the victim or preventing future abuses. This has happened in sports, on college campuses, at small-town high schools, and within the Catholic church. Kathryn Joyce, in a lengthy piece for the American Prospect, profiles one man who believes, perhaps naively, that he can interrupt this process when it comes to evangelical Christian institutions.
Boz Tchividjian is an unlikely advocate for victims of sexual violence. He’s the grandson of Billy Graham and a law professor at Liberty University, a conservative Christian school founded by Jerry Falwell. But he honed his legal chops as a prosecutor who worked on many sexual abuse cases, and he’s turned that experience around to start GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), an organization devoted to investigating Christian institutions and improving their responses to people who report sexual abuse in the ranks. The only problem, as Joyce discovered, is that GRACE appears to be a little too good at its job, and often the institutions that initially hire it end up firing it rather than deal with their own cultures of covering up and minimizing sexual abuse.
The most high-profile example of this that Joyce reports on was Bob Jones University. The famously conservative Christian school brought GRACE in to clean house after 20/20 discovered, in 2011, that one of its graduates, a New Hampshire minister named Chuck Phelps, had, upon discovering that one of his congregants raped and impregnated a teenager, thought it appropriate to shame the victim by making her “confess” her supposed sins in front of the congregation. Bob Jones University didn’t want the story to reflect badly on the school, so it responded by hiring Tchividjian and his staff to interview faculty and students about their experiences with sexual assault. What they discovered was a culture of victim-blaming.
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